Australian Targets

Monday, October 24, 2011

Limiting global average temperature rise to 2 °C may be slipping from the world's grasp without urgent action this decade on emission reduction to combat climate change according to new review of climate modeling of emission pathways by a team lead by Dr Joeri Rogelj.

The two degree limit on global warming was adopted in 2009 at Copenhagen and reaffirmed a year later at the UN climate conference in Cancun.

"If this is to be achieved, policymakers need robust information about the amounts of future greenhouse-gas emissions that are consistent with such temperature limits. This, in turn, requires an understanding of both the technical and economic implications of reducing emissions and the processes that link emissions to temperature." says the study, published in Nature Climate Change on October 23, 2011.

"We find that in the set of scenarios with a ‘likely’ (greater than 66%) chance of staying below 2 °C, emissions peak between 2010 and 2020 and fall to a median level of 44 Gt of CO2 equivalent in 2020 (compared with estimated median emissions across the scenario set of 48 Gt of CO2 equivalent in 2010). Our analysis confirms that if the mechanisms needed to enable an early peak in global emissions followed by steep reductions are not put in place, there is a significant risk that the 2 °C target will not be achieved."

For each single degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) of additional warming, 5 to 10 percent less rain falls in the U.S. Southwest, the Mediterranean and southern Africa; 5 to 10 percent less streamflow occurs in some river basins, including the Arkansas and Rio Grande; and 5 to 15 percent crop-yield declines occur in corn in the United States and Africa, and wheat in India. Read more on the likely impacts from Warming World: Impacts by Degree (PDF 8.25mb) by the US National Academy of Sciences.

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Time to leap out of the slowly boiling pot of earth's warming climate
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I don't want my children to ask why I didn't act after reading the
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member of environmental NGOs and community groups for 30 years in Australia, currently living in Melbourne. A Citizen journalist for the Indymedia network in Australia and worldwide. I am an editor and contributor with Australia Indymedia. Climate Indymedia and the global features collective. I also post photoessays to Flickr and videos to Youtube and edit wikipedia as user Tirin. My website is takver.com where I can be contacted through the feedback form, the most reliable way to contact me. I can also be contacted through facebook and on twitter as @takvera.